The plan to provide alternate handicapped parking at The Seattle Center, adjacent to the Seattle Repertory Theatre – an alternative to the original proposal to relocate handicapped parking to the Mercer Street Garage so the Center and The Rep can build a memorial to Peter Donnelly – is one of those emergency retrenchments that shows only that everyone involved was in scramble mode and that no one who was doing the thinking is disabled – or asked anyone who is.

I’m going to list the reasons why this Warren Street Compromise is a bad idea; why this scheme, which these folks are now slapping each other on the back about, is really not a whole lot less stupid and insensitive than the original plan to ghettoize disabled people into the Mercer Street Garage:

1. The original spaces kept disabled patrons from having to deal with our whacky and frequently oblivious local drivers at all. There was no street to cross and no curb cuts to navigate.

2. The distance involved is, yes, shorter than the Mercer Garage would have been but is STILL more than twice as far as the original spaces. (I’m not guessing. I was down there looking at it not even twenty minutes ago) This may be a moot point for people who are in chairs – especially motorized chairs – but it makes the task even harder for those who are elderly or dependent on walkers, for whom every yard is a trial.

3. I’m willing to bet a LARGE sum of money that, knowing how “reliable” our city can sometimes be about things involving streets (anyone remember the snow/ice storms of this past winter?), it won’t be more than one or two evenings of theatre-going before we wind up with someone forgetting to do whatever it is the City plans to do to re-designate those Warren Street spaces. Then, you have disabled patrons arriving for the Rep and finding that, oops!, nobody reserved the spaces so there’s no parking and they wind up in…the Mercer Street Garage!

4. For that matter, how is the city planning to MOVE citizens who have lawfully parked on Warren Street before theatre hours? Tow them? What if the entire street is taken? Do they send police officers looking in every local business and telling people to move their cars?

5. The Warren Plan forces disabled drivers to assemble their chairs in the street, with the heavy Queen Anne evening traffic whipping by. They have to exit their vehicles in the actual right-of-way. The assumption that all or even most disabled people will simply be “dropped off” is as silly and insupportable as saying that all disabled people have the same disability. MS sufferers face radically different challenges than those that are handled by spinal cord injury victims, which are different yet from those living with birth defects and brian injury patients and amputees.

6. Van users with power lifts have no guarantee that they’ll be able to find spaces that make opening and using their lifts possible, especially if the vehicle is a rear-lift configuration.

7. In winter, given our city’s rather dismal record of clearing streets of snow and ice, the task of cleaning Warren Street and making it usable for wheelchairs and walkers is vastly complicated by continuous traffic. The existing spaces can simply be roped off for the time necessary to clear that lot, outside of theatre hours and while still allowing pedestrian access.

8. The actual text of the ADA rules on designated parking spaces reads “Accessible parking spaces must be located on the shortest accessible route of travel to an accessible facility entrance. Where buildings have multiple accessible entrances with adjacent parking, the accessible parking spaces must be dispersed and located closest to the accessible entrances.” The Warren Street plan eliminates the “shortest accessible route of travel” in favor of a purely cosmetic “improvement” to the Seattle Center Grounds which could be even MORE easily relocated to other areas of the grounds (for example, thirty yards away in the dead area at the corner of the fountain green) without diminishing it’s impact as a fitting memorial to Peter Donnelly.

9. The decision to move the spaces AT ALL says, in effect, that the needs and personal safety of disabled theatre patrons and Center-goers is of lesser importance than the desire of the Rep, the Center, and the City to build yet another cosmetic enhancement that will, as with every other space of its type in the Center, be used by a very small number of people at any one time. The Asian iron bell gazebo just to the south of the current spaces was another one of those “must have” enhancements which has now become so generally disregarded that most people don’t even realize it’s there. Out of the approximately 100 times I’ve entered the Center via Mercer Street, I have NEVER seen a single person sitting on the benches there or admiring the bell, not to mention the fact that the bell is of such huge importance to the Center that it appears to have never been cleaned once in the past ten years and has no readily apparent markings to even explain what it is. The ground the bell sits on would make a lovely, well-situated memorial for Peter Donnelly that would be immediately adjacent to the Rep and wouldn’t necessitate moving ANY spaces of actual utility to Center patrons.

10. The most alarming inadequacy of this plan is the simple likelihood that the city, the Rep, and the Center asked NO ONE within the local disabled community if this would be a good idea. This at least gives the appearance of that phenomenon which all disabled people know far too well: their welfare and safety being addressed by well-meaning but completely clueless “normal” (non-disabled) people. Were ANY local disabled-persons’ groups asked for feedback? Was even ONE disabled citizen asked to comment? Anyone confined to a chair or dependent on any assistive device already knows that the term “ADA compliant” is frequently nothing better than a sick joke: shower benches in hotel bathrooms that are too far from the spigot for a person who can’t stand to even reach them; ramps that are too steep for the elderly, people on walkers, or those simply not strong enough to negotiate; curb cuts that have excessive lips or cracks that trap wheelchair casters and risk tossing the user out of the seat; public bathrooms that either have no grab bars or are too small to turn a wheelchair around in or have a non-ADA-height toilet that’s simply too low for disabled people to use safely; cracked and broken sidewalks; sidewalks that are so canted for drainage that wheelchair users can’t push along them without pulling muscles; hotel and restaurant and retail store aisles and walkways that are so cluttered that people in chairs simply cannot squeeze by. All of this is the daily life of disabled Americans. Do we really need one more vestpocket park badly enough that we need to heap this on their shoulders, too?

Those who say, “Well, why don’t the disabled just________?” are a huge part of the problem disabled people face. Their bland assumptions that disabled citizens can “just do” anything is ample proof of how uninformed some people can be. If you want to see what it’s REALLY like to be disabled, do what I did: I got into my wife’s chair and spent one whole day living as normally as possible in Bellevue, forcing myself to stay in it to eat, shop, go to the bathroom, and anything else I might need to do. No getting out, no cheating. I’m a big, strong guy; 6’1″ and 200 pounds. I gave up in abject defeat by 2:00 in the afternoon. Folks, being disabled is hard; harder than anything you have ever done and there’s no time off, no respite, no chance to step outside the reality of it and find any relief. Making this harder for anything less than an earthshaking reason – which this well-deserved monument to Peter Donnelly is just not – is, literally, adding Insult to Injury.